Data | Automation | Efficiency

Power Query for PPC Explained

Power Query is a free Microsoft Excel extension/built-in feature. This tool was mainly built for business intelligence industry. However, if you know few tips & tricks you can turn Power Query into a very powerful PPC search tool which will help you solve your long term pains (copy & pasting, freezing Excel, repetitive operations…).

For those of of you familiar with BI terminology – Power Query is a tool for data ETL (extraction, transformation & load). In other words, it is primarily a tool for building cool reports from various sources.

This is how Power Query looks in Excel:

Power Query in Excel (varies based on the version)

This is how it look when you open Power Query interface:

Power Query Interface (varies based on the version)

With Power Query:

You can join data from various sources (XLSXs, CSVs, Google Drive files, Facebook, BI Cubes, Teradata, tables on a website…). There is infinite number of combinations. Common use case for PPC is a 1-click refreshable report based on Google & Bing csv data.

You can also generate rows of data based on various rules. And that’s what we need for building our campaigns, right?

Here is a little teaser of what Power Query can actually do for your PPC search campaigns:

I highly recommend you spend 10 minutes watching the video. You may save hundreds of work hours in future.

You will see than you can dynamically build keyword lists (KWs in all match types in all regions/segments…), ad group names, campaigns, ads, sitelinks, and callouts with 1 click after you setup your queries. The example with keyword build up on the video took me 30 minutes to build.

On this blog, I will be showing campaign build up from scratch with all the elements (keywords, ad groups, ads, campaigns, sitelinks, callouts). At the end, you will be able to dynamically generate new KWs and ad groups with one click.